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posted by NCommander on Monday December 05 2022, @08:37AM   Printer-friendly
Hey folks,

Well, it's been a bit of time since the last time I posted, and well, I had to think a fair bit on the comments I received. It's become very clear that while I'm still willing to at least help in technical matters, the effort to reforge SN is much higher than I expected. In addition, given the, shall we say, lukewarm response I got to my posts and journal entries, well, I'm clearly not the right person for the job.

I think at this point, it's time to figure out who is going to lead SN going forward. After my de facto stepping down in 2020, the site has, for want of a better word, been a bit listless. At the moment, no one on staff really has the cycles to take that position on. A few people have expressed interest in the position, and I've talked with Matt, who is co-owner of the site about this. By and large, whoever fills the seat will have to figure out what, if anything, needs to change in regards to moderation policy, content, and more.

If you're interested in potentially fulfilling the role, drop me an email at michael -at- casadevall.pro, with the subject of "SN Project Leader", and include the following:

  • Who you are
  • What you want to do with the site
  • How you intend to do it
  • Why do you want to get involved

I'll leave this call for candidates open until December 14th, at which point Matt and I will go through, and figure out our short list, I'll talk to editors, and solicit more comments from the community. I'm hoping to announce a successor in early January, and formalize the transition sometime in February, which will be the site's 9th anniversary.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday December 06 2022, @10:51AM (3 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday December 06 2022, @10:51AM (#1281379)

    > It's pretty easy, and it'd done by cron.daily scripts

    Implementing backups is usually pretty easy. But unless you regularly test for a disaster recovery, the backup procedure will go mouldy. So it needs someone to regularly check that cron is running the job properly, the backups are going still somewhere sensible and the data is recoverable. That's a waste of an afternoon every few months, so you need someone to volunteer for that (not me).

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday December 06 2022, @06:16PM (2 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday December 06 2022, @06:16PM (#1281411)

    Yes, and I do that now for the servers I admin (occasional work- not full-time).

    It takes very little time. Maybe an hour if I'm super thorough, make extra manual copies, etc. But just looking at the directory lists of backup files takes maybe a couple of minutes.

    Oh- almost forgot- "logwatch" and "anacron" logging programs email summaries of the processes and files that were backed up, so that's pretty good indication that all went well. Of course, that is not logically definitive, but so far, it's never failed (14+ years).

    I've rarely needed to do a restore, except one major time when one webserver failed- something in hardware, and in failing somehow the mirrored drive pair (not my build- previous person's) got severely corrupted. Being an efficiency-bound person, I had another machine on standby, ready to go.

    • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 07 2022, @08:38AM (1 child)

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday December 07 2022, @08:38AM (#1281500)

      Okay - once upon a time we had a situation where backups were all made as intended, but due to a misconfiguration/misintention we could not restore from backup when needed. So I would go through the restore procedure.

      (Yes, the sysadmin did screw up. People are fallible, not everyone who is asked to sysadmin in a small outfit has enough experience/knowledge to get it right.)

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday December 07 2022, @06:15PM

        by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday December 07 2022, @06:15PM (#1281573)

        No question, people and things and procedures are imperfect. Restore testing is critically important. Of course, that done onto a copied image of the system.

        I'm curious- what are some of the specifics of the situation you encountered? OS? FS? Backup software, or scripts running things like mysqldump, gzip, tar, ftp, etc.? Media onto which the backups were stored?